Chaos: The Director's Cut

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All Rise...

"The most brutal movie ever made" meets its match in the most brutal review Judge Rafael Gamboa has ever written.

The Charge

"The most brutal movie ever made."

Opening Statement

This movie made me laugh. The sheer volume of imbecility I was subjected to
soundly defeated any impulses towards physical disgust. Chaos is a film that (unwittingly) insults
the intelligence of anyone with a quarter of a brain while trying very hard (and
not entirely succeeding) to lay siege your stomach. To make matters worse, it's
also a blatant rip-off of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, which in
turn was a rip-off of master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. Somewhere during this
process of recycling the same material, all artistry, intelligence, and
craftmanship disappeared, replaced with a brainless exploitation piece.

Facts of the Case

Supposedly based on the real-life work of serial-killer Donald "Pee
Wee" Gaskins, the film is writer-director David "The Demon"
DeFalco's (The Backlot Murders) "realistic" depiction of a
double-homicide of two teenage girls caught in a gruesome cycle of unbelievable
bad luck. They go to a rave party in the woods, meet a creepy character in hopes
of scoring ecstasy, and follow him to his creepy cabin to meet his creepy
friends. They then get killed in horrifying and inexplicably contrived ways in
order to warn the audience of the dangers of following creepy characters into
the woods.

This Director's Cut comes with three extra minutes of footage. Whoopee.

The Evidence

This movie is bad. Really, really bad. It's a piece of cheap exploitative
sadism made so much worse by its aggravatingly incompetent execution. It's a
film that hides behind the rice-paper defense of being a cautionary tale as a
justification for showing fully naked young girls getting brutally murdered by
men whose penises are somehow never seen despite how often they take off their
pants. It's a film whose characters either have no purpose for existing except
to die or whose actions fail to have any sort of psychological logic. It's a
film hounded by a mind-boggling inability to construct space and time in any
understandable fashion. And worst of all, the narrative is a putrid example of
the worst kind of deus ex machina.

Let's ignore the ethical woes of this film for the moment and focus instead
on its artistic and technical failings. The first thing that should be discussed
is the film's atrocious spatial construction. Here's a macroscopic example: The
girls drive from their Home to the Woods, then get on foot and cross a Bridge to
get to the Party. From there, they walk to the Cabin of Doom, where they are
thrown in a van and driven to the Killing Spot in a different part of the Woods.
Now, from this we can infer several things: First, that Home is sufficiently far
away from the Party that a car is necessary, and likewise the Cabin of Doom is
far enough away from the Killing Spot to require the use of a van. One can also
infer that the Killing Spot is far away from the Party, since it is further than
the Cabin. And lastly, since they are in the Woods, that all these
aforementioned places will be difficult to find from the randomly chosen Killing
Spot, and almost impossible to find a person who happens to run away out of
eyesight. Of course, the movie doesn't draw a map for us, but these are all
probably safe assumptions, right?

Wrong.

The girls have several escape attempts, and in the course of these escape
attempts we come to learn several things. It turns out that the Killing Spot is
actually within prancing distance of the Bridge and walking distance of the
Home. It also appears that the girls have been implanted with subcutaneous
homing beacons, because no matter how many times they run away or how long they
spend running or how many times they change direction, the bad guys untrained in
tracking always seem to be able to know exactly where they are. The bad guys
also seem to find them despite the fact they're walking and the running girls
have a sizable head start, which means the bad guys are probably capable of
teleportation. This is a deduction that seems to be supported by an incident
when one of the fleeing girls sees the Bridge and clambers up the slope to it,
only to find the bad guys waiting for her on the other side regardless of
the fact they were behind her and should not have been able to get to the other
side without first crossing that same Bridge or somehow vaulting themselves
across the gaping chasm.

These shenanigans permeate almost every minute of the film. Characters are
constantly happening across things in a cheaply providential way. People who
didn't have a clue as to where the party was just happen to pull off the long
winding road at the precise spot they'll need to get on foot and find the girls'
parked car on their first try, and then manage to come across one of the girls'
bodies five minutes later—all of this in the middle of the night in
the freakin' woods. And it's not just the larger space and time of the
film that's mangled; even small incidents stop making sense. People who were
beaten to a pulp manage to escape a room without making a single noise, somehow
escaping the detection of the people who were standing three feet from them,
blocking the exit, and whose combined peripheral vision would have seen any
movement faster than an incremental crawl. I assume, therefore, that these
people escaped by gliding on their bellies and cloaking themselves.

The characters are all empty little shells. The good guys are the
cliché archetypes you've seen in every Lifetime Original Movie involving
rape and abuse. The mother is paranoid and completely out of touch with reality,
the father is the "Don't worry, remember when we were kids too?" foil,
the girls are naïve morons, and the cops are bumbling idiots. The bad guys,
on the other hand, don't seem to be people at all. They're just…there. The
only character that seems to have any sort of reality and internal psychological
motivations is Chaos (Kevin Gage, Paparazzi, Blow), the leader of the bad guys, but he can
summed up in one sentence: a misogynist sadist murderer who reacts violently to
anything feminine. With the exception of Chaos, all the characters act in
contradicting ways that are only explicable as a means to advance what meagre
plot there is.

All of this is the result of a writer who doesn't care about anything except
killing people off. Roger Ebert said something to the effect that the narrative
of the film is a closed-circuit system that dooms characters to an inescapable
fate, to which David "The Demon" DeFalco responded by saying there are
numerous opportunities for escape in the film. This is true, but all these
opportunities are all shut down in entirely unrealistic and unfair ways.
It's as if you had a winning hand, turned it in, and then the dealer tells you,
"Actually, you lose, because I'm taking your cards and using them for
myself." Yes, you had a chance to win, but you lost not out of bad luck or
poor ability, but because the person presiding over the game made you lose
anyway. That's pretty much what happens in this movie all the time.

Not only are the mise-en-scene and narrative abysmal, but the haphazard
editing exacerbates all their space-time acrobatics and also manages to step on
rookie land mines that anyone who's taken a high school-level media class would
know to avoid. Characters will shift around on screen because the filmmakers
have a poor sense of shot composition and continuity editing. This culminates in
a horrible goof in the final scene that makes it seem like something happens to
somebody that actually happens to somebody else, making the already nonsensical
scene even less comprehensible. The sound also has a bizarre tendency to
fluctuate from loud to quiet for no reason except to force you to adjust your
volume every six minutes.

About the DVD features, they mostly lame. There is a poorly-edited filmed
rebuttal offering a weak and barely articulated counter-argument to Roger
Ebert's scathing analysis of the film. This video is also bafflingly plagued by
an incessant jingling noise with no apparent source, which doesn't help David
"The Demon" DeFalco look professional. There's also a documentary on
the LA Coroner's Crypt which would be incredibly interesting and engaging if it
weren't for the periodically spliced in footage of David "The Demon"
DeFalco being a cartoonish freak of a moron in front of the camera, showing zero
respect for the dead around him by acting like a shirtless goth professional
wrestler, flexing his abnormal muscles and making silly animal grunts and snarls
while boasting about how cinematic history is being made because he's the first
director to be interviewed in a crypt. There's also a commentary track by
"The Demon" and producer Steven Jay Bernheim that I didn't bother to
listen to. Sue me.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Redeeming qualities? Actually, there are a few. The acting is fairly decent.
Kevin Gage is by far the best of the bunch, and the rest turn in pretty good
performances. The two girls, however, were obviously chosen not because they
were good actresses, but because they were good-looking and because they could
scream. There is also one gory special effect that looks incredibly real
and is considerably well done. But that's about it.

Closing Statement

It's ironic that a film called Chaos
is so internally inconsistent and irregular as to provide an anarchic
experience, yet still manages to be implacably predictable. There's no stopping
the events that happen, no matter how awkwardly or illogically the film gets to
them. This movie is dumb and it's boring, and it's not even worth watching for
free.

The Verdict

Guilty of being a terrible movie. The court sentences Chaos to be taken out back and shot.